And so this is Christmas...

...and what have I done?

Certainly another year older though not necessarily wiser. Occasionally more cynical and that's one to go on the Resolutions list. This has been the year that I have lost one friend, and seen the nature of a relationship change. I have driven almost 3,000 klms of the Camino in retrospective, and flown to Canada to be a keynote speaker at a conference on Gnosticism based on Pilgrimage to Heresy. I have let go of things. I have come to treasure the peace and quiet of my home. I have overcome Writer's Block and am well into Compostela the second book in the Camino Chronicles series.

And I have become a first-time GrandMom and that's the very best of all. I love my little Puppy with all of my heart. I can watch her for hours just learning about the world.

And I hope that I too am continuing to learn about the world as I progress with my home schooling project and find that trying to condense "general knowledge" into a relatively short curriculum is a real challenge and one that we are enjoying immensely. I have seen my client base wax and wane and wax again following "El Crisis". Who knows what 2011 has in store for debt ridden Spain with our 20% unemployed?

Next year I will be blogging less frequently for the simple fact that I have a book to finish and a deadline to meet. I began these pages writing a history of the Camino, in particular the story of how Santiago and Compostela came to be linked together. I shall be continuing with this and the fascinating story of Diego Gelmirez, first archbishop of Compostela and the main historical character of my novel. I hope you will come along for the ride.

Happy 2011 to everyone who visits these pages. I hope the new year brings for you everything you wish for yourselves. For myself I ask for a chance to continue to write, to help adults in my psychotherapy practice and children in my Learning Centre. I ask for the chance to mellow and enjoy the pleasures of the Ordinary and remember that Yesterday is History, Tomorrow a Mystery,

but Today is a Gift.
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God is All Good...

Such reasoning only led me to the conclusion that either:

God is not all good - because he either denied his creation access to their true natures, or else put temptation deliberately in their way so that he could exercise his power over them whether they transgressed or not. A God who wishes to keep his creations in the cave of ignorance cannot be all good.

God is not all knowing or else he would have realised that his creature was no fool. "God" is blind to the true nature of his creation, and blind to the fact that he is neither good nor powerful. His name is Samael, the Blind One, and he is evil personified.

God is not all powerful - he could have prevented them from having the longing for knowledge had he wanted to.

Strong words...? Try these on for size:

slavery, genocide, terrorism, poverty, environmental catastrophe, paedophilia, sex slavery, ignorance, squalor, domestic violence, rape, the exploitation of the weak majority by the rich minority, and the inability to free our minds from religious institutions which in order to secure our loyalty must keep us in a state of perpetual fear!

If man is responsible for all this, how can he have been created in the image of a Perfect God? Perfection cannot admit evil or it is not perfection. If God is responsible for this, well, he has one hell of a lot to answer for!

Who created evil? Satan? Perhaps. But who is the Devil and how did he get to have such a hold over us?

There is only one conclusion, that which we have been taught to worship as God, even knowing or perhaps despite the horrifics of the Old Testament and the evidence of our own television screens, is not God. This god is deeply flawed, malicious and insecure, ignorant of his own weaknesses and caprices, jealous of...?

In fact, God is indeed all good etc., but there is another God who perfectly fits this description. And once we realise this, the heaviness of the world, the imperfections of our bodies, the torment of our minds as they strive to make a sense of this life we have been thrown into, all assume their proper place as subservient to our true nature and are allowed to return to our true home, not as the Catholic church will tell you, after death, but in this life. We can be resurrected in the flesh as pure spirit.

Master, when shall the kingdom come? And he answered us straightways: It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying Here it is or There it is. Rather the kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth. But men do not see it.

You will not find this is the New Testament; you will not even find it exactly as it is written here in the Gnostic Writings. It is an excerpt from The Apocryphon of Jesus the Christ which Kieran in Pilgrimage to Heresy is translating. As far as I know, no such gospel exists, yet the words are pure Gnostic, pure Priscillian, pure Cathar, and they are what I have come to believe in myself.

The world came about by a mistake. For he who created it wanted to make it imperishable and immortal. But he fell short of attaining his desire. For the world never was immortal; nor for that matter was he who made the world.

Who would ever have thought to find Jesus saying these words? Yet in the Gnostic writings they are repeated many times.

The disciples asked Jesus: Lord, when will the New World come? And he answered them: What you look forward to has already come and you still do not realise it.
The disciples entreated him: Lord, how shall we know truth from falsehood?
The saviour answered us thus: woe to those who are captives. For they are bound in caverns. In mad laughter do they rejoice in what they think you see. They neither realise their perdition,. nor do they reflect upon their circumstances. They do not realise that they have dwelt in darkness and death.
Some will say the lord died first and rose up, they are in error for he will rise up first and then die. If you do not attain the resurrection first then you too will die.

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is...
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A Child's Garden of Gnosticism - Revisited

So, I suppose that brings me back to me.

If God is All Good...
If God is All Powerful...
If God is All Knowing...

Why do evil things happen?

The problem is, as has been pointed out by the Rev. Doctor Stephen Hoeller of the Los Angeles Gnostic Church, that it is impossible to reconcile these premises one with another. Personally, I think I may have predated Dr. Hoeller since I figured this out at the age of 16 around about the time I dropped God. My reasoning went a bit like this:

If God is all-knowing, then God must be aware of human fragility and weakness so that any attempt at testing humankind is expecting man to be Godlike: pure and omnipotent etc.

Either that, or expecting man to fail. If that was the expected outcome, it hardly seems fair to put us through a test that we are by nature (God-given nature at that) destined to fail. We are either perfect and able to withstand temptation, or we are not. Or some of us are...although that would make us less than human, and more like God.

God-like...Like God?

It's getting tricky already! Especially if that God is jealous by self-proclamation.

If God is all good but allows catastrophe and evil to exist then he is not all powerful. If he is all powerful and allows such things to happen, then he is not all good at all.

Ah, but I hear you say: Evil came about because of man's original sin and we have been paying for it ever since. The sins of the fathers and all that. According to Saint Augustine, who turned tailcoat against the Manichees the minute he realised what had happened to Priscillian could happen to him: "sin" is a sexually transmitted disease.

Saint Augustine, however, was writing not far from 400 years after Christ was born. And nobody else had ever suggested such a thing as the idea of children born tainted with sins of their species.

What a horrendous idea! I am tempted to say: "Jesus would turn in his grave".

There...I said it.

Yet somehow, we have been fed this as "Gospel Truth" since the time we were able to understand speech...Generation after generation of newborns cursed to go through life with the greatest of guilts weighing down their innocent souls. And what was that guilt? Wanting to Know!

Let's take the proposition that God created man in his own image. This begs the question: "What image?" If we are speaking of a physical image, well all well and good. But if that is so then God must suffer the same decay as we do, and the same bodily inconveniences which I will leave to your imagination. If however, we posit that this may have meant "in God's intellectual image" (the Nous), then we have to assume that not only does man have free will, but the right to use it. That being so, it is hardly surprising that Adam would have found Eve's gift of interest. And what if man was not exactly created, but partook of the spiritual image of God? Then surely that would make man Godlike, or perhaps even God as a piece of a hologram is the whole hologram.

Even though holograms didn't exist when I was sixteen, this was the form my reasoning was taking.

Is it possible, I thought, that God might not be the good, powerful, knowing being that we have been told to worship? Suppose, having created man, God found out that his creation somehow was smarter than he had expected him to be? Or conversely, is it possible that God thought man his creation simple and foolish and unlikely to give Him any trouble? It all boils down to the rather more plausible possibility that either man was intended to be an automaton, created to serve a lesser God who being All Good should not have debased his creation in such a way in the first place, or else, man proved to be too smart for God to handle hence the prohibitions about trees and apples and all that. Man, he found, was investigative: he, and she, seeks knowledge as a way to truth, and having found the means to that truth becomes all knowledgeable, all powerful, and good. What is the nature of that truth? Could it be that man and woman, realising their bondage to their earthly bodies, recognised that within them was a heavenly spirit, forever at one with and a part of the true God? Could it be that this investigation led Eve and Adam to the conclusion that the one they have been told to worship "above all others" is not only jealous, but deeply flawed!

What would be the one and only outcome of this conclusion? Atheism. Apostasy before religion had even been created. Now obviously "God" couldn't have that and so to punish Adam, Eve and all humankind to come for daring to challenge his orders, they would be forever removed from this paradise he had created for them where they had been expected to remain forever in ignorance of their true origins.
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A Vengeful Saint - Dominic Guzman...

I have been to Montsegur. I left a white rose on a rock. To this day the atmosphere is redolent of sadness, injustice, and ignorance. I felt no glory there.

After this, there appeared to be no more organised Cathar resistance although the practice continued in secret, much as it is likely the Priscillianists had to take their conventicles out from the houses of adherents and elite to clearings in the forest, mountain retreats etc. But the Popes knew that the threat remained. By 1226, the second crusade against heresy had crushed the southern counts and the entire region had been annexed to France under the Capetian rule of St. Louis who had headed the Crusade in person. Meanwhile, in 1229, there emerges in the Languedoc a Spanish priest named Dominic, a religious fanatic and thoroughly unpleasant man, although it must be said that he cannot be held directly responsible for the deeds of the Dominican Inquisition which he founded as by then he was already dead.

For several years, now, I have spoken words of peace to you. I have preached to you; I have besought you with tears. But as the common saying goes in Spain: where a blessing fails a good thick stick will succeed. Now we shall rouse princes and prelates against you; and they, alas, will in their turn assemble whole nations and peoples and a mighty number will perish by the sword. Towers will fall and walls will be razed to the ground. And you will all of you be reduced to servitude.

Thus force will prevail where gentle persuasion has failed to do so.

These are the words of Christian "Saint" Dominic to the Christian"`heretic"`: the Cathars. The Lamb to the Wolves...

You decide.

The Inquisition was charged to do anything at all they wished to force Cathars to recant. This stopped short of actual torture or death. They had to keep their souls pure for the Holy Office. Instead, they handed their victims over to the secular forces for that. Any and every means could and was used to exact the "truth" from these poor innocent men and women in order to save them from eternal damnation, the perpetrators never knowing that it was they themselves who already lived in hell. The atmosphere of distrust in towns and villages grew daily. Anyone could be arrested on the grounds that they carried on heretical practices, never knowing the exact nature of their so called crimes, not the identity of their accusers. Bodies of suspected heretics were dug up to be thrown to the flames.

By the middle of the 14th century, there was not a Cathar left.

The Burning of the Holy Martyrs...

The Synod of Verona took place in 1184. It was convened for the specific purpose of condemning the Waldensians, another Gnostic group whose beliefs were very similar to those of the Cathars who also travelled and preached in pairs as did the Bogomils. It was clearly only a matter of time.

In 1198, the very mis-named Innocent III tried to launch a crusade against the Cathars but couldn't drum up much support. The nobles and knights lived side by side with the Cathars, some, such as the Count of Toulouse, were clearly Cathar sympathisers and in some cases, their mothers and sisters were Parfaits and Parfaites. "Why would we want to persecute them'' the knights said in Albi. "They are our neighbours and our friends and we respect them and their honest work". Innocent had to be content with seething and fuming while his church became more and more shipwrecked by the doubts of the people.

But after Cathar sympathisers were suspected in the murder of a Papal legate near Toulouse in 1109, Innocent decided to make a call for Holy War and this time he had the backing of the King of France. He exhorted the knights to exercise their religious zeal, promising them full remission of sins for any deeds they carried out in the name of God. These men, for the most part, were mercenaries, interested in nothing but the spoils of war. Near Beziers, a town of some 20,000 both Cathar and Catholic, the townspeople were so terrified of the massed forces that they hid in the Church of Mary Magdalene. When asked by a commander what he should do in this situation, their leader Armaud Amaury most famously exclaimed:

`Kill them all; God will recognise his own`.

What followed over the next 40 years was some of the most blatant butchery ever carried out in the name of Jesus. At Minerve after a long and drawn out siege which ended when the water supply was contaminated, 140 went to the flames. When the knights approached their leader - who had offered clemency to any who accepted the Catholic faith - and said that they weren't there to see heretics escape, he told them not to worry. "They won't recant", he said. He was right. Chroniclers of the time say that the heretics "hurled themselves into the flames". At Lavaur, 400 Perfecti died the same death. Finally in 1244 at Montsegur, perhaps the most famous Cathar site of all, 225 Parfaits and Parfaites died by being burned alive at the bottom of the mountain upon which stood the castle which had been the last remaining Cathar stronghold.

After a prolonged siege, the defences of the castle of Montsegur were breached by a group of Gastons. The residents asked for 15 days to prepare for their deaths and distributed their clothes and few possessions to prepare for a death they did not believe in. Those who were credentes were given the option of deciding during those days whether they would give up their faith and walk free or not. It is on record that 20 credentes asked the leading Parfait Bertrand Marti to be consoled. What is extraordinary about this is that as ordinary believers they could have survived the capitulation, but as Parfaits they knew they would be burned alive.

The words of the Consolamentum are known to us. Part of the sacrament states that the supplicant say: "I have this will and determination. Pray to God for me that he will give me strength".

They would have needed it.
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Priscillian, the Good Man...?

So what, then, is the world?

Simply put, hell.

This, folks is the realm of the Devil - you are in the Matrix, trapped on the island like Truman and the only way you are going to break out is to come to the realisation of what you are, where you have come from, what binds you to this world of suffering, and what you have to do to extricate your soul.

And you'd better wake up soon or you are destined to continue to be trapped in ignorance for many lifetimes.

Some very notable comparisons between the Cathars and the Priscillianists can be made here: both groups were vegetarians eating no meat or meat products, although fish appears to have been allowed since fish, according to the Cathars, did not have sexual intercourse to reproduce. Neither group drank wine as it was considered not only intoxicating to the spirit but contaminated with the earth of the material world. I am not sure what they thought about leeks and carrots. But I digress.

Both groups were expected to pray, day and night, but while Priscillian asked his followers to read all books including the Apocrypha it seems more likely that such books were not available to the Cathari who seemed to take much of their doctrine from the Gospel of St. John. This is not to say however, that there could not have been an oral tradition of additional material or perhaps they may even have had one or more of the so-called heretical writings as part of the much-written about "Cathar treasure".

The Cathars had no respect for the cross likening it to "the gallows on which your father was hanged". Instead their symbol was the dove of peace. Scorning the visible opulence in which the clergy, and particularly the Pope lived, they sought voluntary poverty. They denied the Apostolic Succession believing the Catholic Popes to be the Antichrist. The Perfecti aimed to live their lives in purity. Once they had taken the Consolamentum they became quite literally Christs themselves, and it is for this reason that the credentes would worship them, often by prostration, not because of any attempt at worldly glorification on their part but because they beheld the living God.
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A World Made in Error...

Following Jesus' perhaps most difficult exhortation, the Cathar perfect once they had received the Consolamentum, were expected to leave their wives, husbands, families. They lived together in houses. When death was close, rather than submit themselves to the decay of the flesh, they would starve themselves to death in fast called the Endura. Not surprisingly, most credentes waited until their deathbed before asking to receive the Consolamentum. In the Roman Catholic church, the rite of Extreme Unction was introduced at about this time to compete with the deathbed ritual of the Cathars.

The Cathars had no doubt that the world and the association with the world was linked with Satan. Jesus could not have died on the cross as what perished was the body, not the spirit. The true world, they said, was spiritual, eternal, immaterial in fact the antithesis of matter. The world eternal was the spiritual renewal of the elected day by day, the knowledge of Christ's kingdom and never of this world. Satan was the king of the world, the visible, temporal world of the named and thus the desired. As Jehovah in the Old Testament he had showed his true colours by pretending to be, or perhaps even believing that he was God, the Creator of all. Satan for the Cathari was the lord of the physical person, the decaying flesh which lusts and covets and makes people sin.

Simply put, for the Cathars - and Priscillian - we are not meant to be here. Humans are the production of the fall of certain angels who followed Samael the Blind One in his fall to earth and were persuaded by him to enter into the bodies of the creatures he made out of sand and dust. When the angels realised the trick that had been played upon them, they longed to escape from their material bodies to return to their celestial selves of pure spirit from which they were taken by false promises and to which they hoped one day to return. The aim of life for the Cathars, then, was to reverse the fall: to re-unite the spirit with the body and in so-doing free oneself from the imprisonment of the soul.
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The Cathars...

The Cathars or Albigenses lived, worked and preached in the areas of France from Toulouse to Beziers and from Albi to Foix in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There were, of course, Cathars outside of these areas. There were other sects whose practices were very much alike to Cathar practices such as the groups in Cologne in Germany, and the Bogomils from what is now Bulgaria and associated regions. It has been suggested often that Catharism originated with the Bogomils and was brought to the Languedoc by Bogomil missionaries. While this is indeed a possibility there are subtle differences between the two groups which suggests perhaps another, more home-grown and indigenous dualist tradition was already there. I suggest that perhaps the Cathars had a Priscillianist root system which in its turn, like many similar so called 'heresies' could trace themselves back to the Essenes of Jerusalem among whose members most likely was counted Jesus and most of his followers. It would only take a seed, a contact or contacts from this region to France or in the case of Priscillian, Spain, for this "heresy" to take root. And not only to take root but to spread.

What we have not been able to access in the history of the spread of Christianity, early Christianity that is, is that Priscillianism was widespread in the latter part of the 4th century; there were Priscillianist followers not only in Galicia, but the whole of Northern Spain, into areas as far south as Córdoba, and then into areas such as the Languedoc and Aquitaine of "Gaul": even into the northern part of Italy!

Priscillian's message was a serious threat to the power of the newly established Roman church: it said that priests and bishops were not necessary to understand the world of God. Not surprisingly it had to be stamped out!

But what is interesting is to see Priscillian's message re-emerge, centuries after Priscillian's death, but perhaps not so long after Priscillianism was forced underground in Spain. When we put Priscillian's message and the message of the Good Men side by side, the seams are almost flawless. How could this be? Many have suggested an influence from the Baltic areas, but do we really have to look that far?

Whatever the reason for their being, by 1143, the majority of Christians in the region were Cathar. Bernard of Clairveaux campaigned in the region against their practices but had no success whatsoever. Increasingly, the Popes, not surprisingly, became alarmed.

Like the Priscillianists, the Cathars had two levels of believer: most were the ordinary people who were allowed, though not encouraged, to marry - although strictly as a bond and not a sacrament - and bring up their families. These were the credentes. They were craftsmen and women, hard working weavers, metalworkers and potters. Above them were the Perfecti. It is hard for us to image the status these men and women had. Like their counterparts amongst the Essenes, these were the Pure Ones, those who had achieved perfection and redemption in this life. These Parfaits and Parfaites had renounced the earthly realm by receiving the only sacrament valid for the Cathars: the Consolamentum. To call this a baptism would be highly misleading. The Cathars renounced baptism as being of the material world. The Consolamentum meant baptism with the spirit and through it the supplicant received the Holy Paraclete, the gift of the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way that Christ had received it at the time of his baptism. For the Cathars the water was not only unnecessary but tainted. This was more a symbolic baptism of fire after which the Parfait became a comforter and a preacher of the only true way to the resurrection they had received, in this life. This is in many ways the core of the Gnostic beliefs and there is little doubt that both Cathars and Priscillianists were Gnostics especially when this realisation of the truth is linked to their dualism. Both groups rejected the Trinity, both made the extraordinary claim that redemption flowed from the understanding of the true nature of man's being, as pure spirit trapped in matter through either curiosity, or the machinations of a devilish trickster who wanted us to believe that faith in Jesus` death on the cross was all we needed to know for our salvation after death.
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On Pain of Death...

The church forbade the reading of the Bible. Catholic Christians were forbidden from reading the Bible, or possessing one in any language, including Latin! Theological discussion with Jews was expressly forbidden since there was no such prohibition in the Jewish faith. St. Louis admonished any Christian upon hearing of the law from a Jew to "thrust his sword into the Jew's belly as far as it will go".

It was considered tantamount to proof of heresy that anyone would feel the need to look for proof of the church's teachings by resorting to bible study. In England, William Tyndale was burned as a heretic for translating the Bible into English and anyone owning or reading his translation was treated likewise.

Not surprisingly, the various translations into the vernacular in the Aquitaine and the southern regions of France had to be stopped and toute de suite!

So who were the Cathars and what did they believe?
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The Hunting of Heretics: The Cathars

The term "Cathars" was never used by those who simply called themselves Les Bonhommes, or Good Christians. While some scholars have claimed the word comes from the Greek Kataroi, meaning the Pure Ones, others, most notably Nicolas Gouzy of the Centre d'Etudes Cathares in France, have suggested that the name was more comparable to an insult deriving from the German "die Ketzerei" meaning "cat worshippers" and indeed in the iconography of the Middle Ages they were almost always accompanied by cats, a symbol of evil for all of Christendom at the time. They have also been often referred to as The Albigenses, after the chronicler Geoffrey of Vigeous in 1181, especially in the scholarly literature. But this too may be a misnomer as the town of Albi was not notably Cathar with the greatest concentration of believers to the south and south east of the Languedoc and towards the foothills of the eastern Pyrenees.

Why were the Cathars (and for ease of recognition, I'll use this term throughout) such a threat to the Roman church that it was deemed necessary to persecute and exterminate them in their hundreds, perhaps thousands?

Notable in the Cathar writings of the 13th century we find this:

"The Roman church is not ashamed to say that they are the lambs of Christ. They say that the heretics they persecute are the church of wolves. But this is absurd. The wolves have always pursued and slaughtered the sheep. It would have to be the contrary for the sheep to be so mad as to hunt down and kill the wolves, and for the wolves to be so passive and patient as to let the sheep devour them."

The early 11th century brought about a crisis of faith. The world had not ended with the Millennium as most expected it to do according to prophecy. The clergy were seen as corrupt, seeking only power and riches; the Latin litany droned on with no-one understanding a word. No-one spoke Latin anymore and comprehension of the mass was reserved only for those who could read and write in that language; this did not even seem to include some of the priests themselves who used onlywell-used psalms and prayer books. In fact, as I shall mention later, the ownership of a bible was a capital offence since it pre-supposed heretical interests! People began to speak openly of the inconsistencies of the Catholic faith and Catholic practices. They spoke out about the usury of the church; of the fees collected by avaricious churchmen and their superstitious rites. The moneys they collected for holy water, oil, and earth for burial. Ordinary people began to move away from the massive cathedrals and abbeys and began to go - as the comedian Lenny Bruce has termed the 20th century spiritual comparison - "...back to God".

What can the world be other than created by the devil, they said. They began to preach detachment from this realm whose prince was Satan and sought ways to "a new heaven, and a new earth where justice will dwell".
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